Charlie Hears from his Anima

This is a dream I had in the early morning of 6 May 2002. I’m leaving it as I first typed it, save linguistic mistakes. There’s at least one continuity hole, I think it made the clearest memory of any dream I can remember. It was very vivid (and colorful), and very plain in its ideas. I think that dreams, and especially this one, are likely to have deeper meaning, but I’m not doing any interpreting for you.

I was in a big bright city full of campers or whatnot — I think it was a little before Camp. It was certainly summer, and people were happy. The streets were big and there was lots to see and everyone walked. There were restaurants and gardens and museums and toy shops and everything along the road. It was great; it was like downtown Santa Barbara on a good day.

I came to a place, a store or something, a little off the road. There was a nook in the wall with no floor and some sheets of paper stapled to it. They were poetry, and I liked them, so I read them. I liked them very, very much. Off to one side was the poet, or maybe just a photo of the poet: a post-starvation Somali woman, barely clothed in something boring, writing complacently on a wall. I stared for a while, and later, when I was talking to one of the curators or caretakers of this display, some people burst in and began to rip her poetry up. If I’d been reading it instead of talking about it, I would have been able to keep them from ripping it. There was a big ugly sneering woman and a couple little neurotic men, and I couldn’t seem to stop them. Eventually I fought or argued them off, or made them go get legal reinforcements, and took a fire-pole down into the nook.

On the floor were the ripped-up papers, and I began to hand them back up to the curators and the other visitors, who didn’t trust me at first. When I bumped into the wall, I saw that it was covered with tiny writing, and when I looked behind me, I saw that the writing covered the walls of a whole story of the building down here. One or two of the other people came down too — loud bright woman poets and meek subtle woman poets and loud jock men poets and me — and I read. It was poetry that I’d been waiting to read for years. It talked about beauty beautifully, and about pain clearly, and it even complained about corporate America well. It was smart and erotic and it covered every wall down here in one piece. The rest of the place was a bookstore of some sort, so for vague property reasons the poet hadn’t been allowed to touch the bookcases or certain parts of the floor, but the whole room was colorful and elevated by her muted pastel under-coloring and her poetry. There was a loft at one end where I climbed up and saw but could not read the end of this poem: her handwriting, in Magic-Marker capitals, said SMART ROOM with arrows at the white space left over at the end of the poem. I thought about that for a while, and felt how odd it is to see someone’s handwriting in Magic Marker after seeing hundreds of square feet of it tiny.

As I was thinking, the indignant people came back. Before they had said that the poetry was obscene and that they needed this space for their private notices, but now they just hated us. We spread out and argued and accepted them and ran away, but I made a mistake: I punched a row of books so that it hit their leader, the sneering woman. She fell down and panicked, and I sprinted for the next nook up. The person ahead of me was one of the jocks, but he had been reading the poetry with interest. When we saw that the only way up was a fire-pole, we laughed while running and he said Good, a challenge! and started shinnying up it. I took the stairs and helped him at the top, and we took off running. I went back the way I came, and made another mistake: I heard someone calling behind me, but when I couldn’t see who it was in the distance, I left them behind. I ran until I was exhausted, and I saw a store with the same blue-and-white awning as the house that had the poetry, and realized that now those people would be after me for a very long time, not after that poetry or any poetry, but after me (I must not have actually seen the poet, the Somali woman, she must have had to disappear, the others would have broken her bones), and that the only thing I had to do now was write poems on walls.